I wasted some time this morning reading Ken & Nicole Show press raleases thinking it might allude to the talent hired to appear in the performance. It turned out to be a lot of gibberish about all the Artistic and Creative people behind the scenes. |
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Ken & Nicole Press Releases
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7 comments:
At first glace when the press release spent so much time discussing writers, designers, and choreographers I thought, "Even more Broadway." No big surprise. Then I started wondering about the references to making the show intimate and interactive. How intimate can you get in the nosebleed seats of the Shark Tank in San Jose? The pre-show for kids is already about as "hands on" as you can get indoors. (Unless they're intending to use the faux intimacy of multi-media.) I don't think I'd care to think about a show where large video screens are important to the performance. On the upside when RBBB hired away every clown on Carson & Barnes at the end of last season they bought one extremely talented, original young performer as part of that package.
We just have to face the truth. RBBB is over and done with. Its a shame Ken and Nicole can use the name. What they have is no circus in any way shape or form. What a waste and disgrace of what used to be. Thank the blog that we at least have the pictures of what a really great RBBB used to be. I still can not figure why they went with a group of people that have no idea what a real circus is.
The emphasis in the press release seems, to me at least, is that the "creative team" has no experience in Circus.
More Broadway? Hell, I complained to Irving Feld that I thought the original Blue Unit was too Broadway at the time.
Bev Kelley spoke for a lot of us when he said of the Felds, "They have a performance...but that's all they have."
Now and then I do like to play The Devil's Advocate. My wife reckons I started making negative comments about RBBB twenty-five years before I was born, about the time that John bought out the competition. With every new edition there's a longer laundry list of reasons why the Feld Entertainment shows aren't "circus" as circus fans, historians, or show people would like to see it. That said, there's a lot more circus in the Red and the Blue units than there is in the Montreal based shows. (I'm not arguing for the lesser of two evils here.) Hats off for the pre-show, because it really does captivate kids. Much as I complain about the "Broadway" aspects, honestly I would have been bored to death with some of what passed for displays in earlier circus eras too. Living statues? I'm asleep already. Even before the Feld buy out the biggest of the more traditional shows chose not to compete for urban audiences week after week in city after city from coast to coast. When any one company is allowed to "own" a portion of the market, they get to define the product. Along the same lines, as other shows have retreated from mid-sized cities, Feld has leveraged the RBBB name to fill the void with Hometown. Even James Bailey appeared to operate on the assumption that circus is a product and circuses are marketing companies. Irving Feld reinvented circus as a New York style musical. Musicals have writers, so RBBB is boasting about who those writers are. The Cirque has morphed circus into pure theater. I guess they get to boast about the carpets.
Fortunately everything that is old becomes new again, and the performance arts tend to rediscover their roots every so often. If that happens to circus, the marketing department will be the first to give us something more akin to what we miss and what we remember. It's probably not a good idea to try to hold your breath until that happens.
I agree completely. When the circus performance ends Mr. Smith asks his little girl "Sally, what did you like best about the circus. Sally will reply "Why the man who wrote the story of course!".
Was any performers name mentioned at all! Who is left to do the actual show? I would be insulted to be named after the broadway people. Really, these two need to get their heads out of the sand and think of just what a circus really is. It sure is not them with their overboard theactrics[sic] Where is the performance supposed to fit in this show?
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